05 February 2014

aim42 - Systematic Approach to Software Maintenance

During the OOP-Conference 2014, Stefan Tilkov and myself released aim42 - the systematic approach to software maintenance and improvement.
We named it "aim", short for "Architecture Improvement Method".
aim42 is a free and open-source project, a community approach to collect practices and patterns.

Why Do We Need Software Architecture Improvement

Software maintenance is a major issue, because over time many
systems degrade massively:
Understandability (and with it, maintainability) goes down, and cost-of-change grow. See the diagram below:

aim4 Phases

It consists of three distinct phases:

Analyze: search and collect problems, issues, deficiencies and technical debt within your system and your development process.

Evaluate:understand root-causes of problems, determine their „value“ and cost/effort of their remedies.

Community Approach

Currently we host the (AsciiDoc) source of the aim42 guidebook on Github, one of the best-known open-source communities.
https://github.com/aim42/aim42
Find some further information (oops - currently in German only) within our initial presentation (on Speakerdeck) or the upcoming YouTube channel.